When we were in Marrakech (perhaps fifteen years ago) we
stayed at the lovely Mamounia hotel. We
had been told by friends that one must take a guide to see the extensive Soukh
and so, despite our bent for going unguided, we did. [The wisdom of this advice
was handily borne out the day after the tour with guide. I pride myself on my fine sense of
direction. Just as we had with the
guide, we set out from the hotel, down to the left, around the first bend,
through the first archway to… a warren
of narrow little pathways leading this way and that, completely
undistinguishable from one another, not by shops – leather goods, colorful
tshotshkes, thises and thats; not by topography – all led down a gentle slope; not
even by smell – the redolent mix of coffee, leather, donkey and spices was
persuasive in all directions. Immediate
capitulation, back to the hotel. Another
tour with a different guide to the ceramics factories and the tanning fields,
the latter only bearable when carrying a sprig of mint held closely under the
nose.] But I digress.
Our guide, tall and well spoken, led us down that road to
the left of the hotel, around the bend and through an archway which looked like
the way into the next street. Magically,
however, we were in a large carpet store.
Our guide stood at the entrance and started a lively conversation with
someone in the store. An elegant
keffiyehed and lavishly moustachioed gentleman in a flowing ivory bisht
instantly met us as if we were long lost friends. “Pliz – some mint tea” he invited. We demurred, realizing that he was intending
to sell these fool tourists a carpet. Both of us motioned that there was no carpet
in our future. “Not wurry. For your eyes only,” quoth he. [this “for your eyes only” has become a
refrain with us ever since].
We found ourselves sitting at a tiny tin table on a
platform-like mezzanine and, indeed, hot mint tea was poured from an impressive
height from a lovely brass teapot into a pair of ornately etched glasses. “For your eyes only,” our charmer repeated,
standing next to us, as a pair of twelve year old boys wearing only thobe pants
climbed atop a mountain of carpets and started slowly flipping over one carpet
at a time so one of its corners met the middle of the opposite side. We watched, deliberately motionless, and
never uttered a sound. “What color do
you like?” asked Keffiyeh. We looked at
each other as if English were Urdu. He
repeated the question in French. No
reaction. In German, nothing. Italian – niente. Spanish – nada. He asked what language might suit. I replied in Hebrew that I did not
understand. He replied in perfectly
passable Hebrew. Ok. The gig was
up. We told him, in English, that there was
absolutely no room in our house for a carpet and that we did not need one. “Not wurry.
For your eyes only”.
Mint tea was ceremoniously sipped (leaves inconspicuously
lifted off tip of tongue and deposited on the inside rim of the pretty glass),
carpets were energetically, rhythmically flipped. Two statues watched the performance. Some fifteen carpets into the presentation,
Keffiyeh quiety said “Aah, I see you like pink”. Had my pupils dilated a micron’s worth? Had I inhaled for a nanosecond longer than
previously? Had one of my pinkies given
me away? There ensued a classic ballet
of Middle Eastern negotiations. [I had
had much practice in this art: when I
was a little girl – eight, nine, ten years old - in Palestine , it had fallen to me to do the
elaborate orange-purchase dance with “our Arab”. “Moukh” – my name for mohammed
– would ring our doorbell on the third floor of our apartment building in Tel
Aviv. One of the five of us would open
the door and find him, all three hundred pounds of him, sitting cross legged on
the little mat at the door, holding up a banged up brass beam scale (the kind
Justice uses), a bunch of stones in one of its bowls, some oranges stolen from
the nearby Pardess (orchard) in the other.
Immediately I would be called to deal with him – I was not only the
bargaining expert but, because I could imitate an Arabic accent in Hebrew, he
understood me best. “Three for a Groush,( a Groush was one hundred Mils, ten
Groush to the Lira, or Palestinian Pound)”
Moukh would offer. I would
immediately close the door in mock insultedness. Promptly, the doorbell rang again, I would
wait the interval he needed to settle down again and hold up his scale. When I opened the door, the price was five
for a Groush. We then performed our
little dance of counteroffers, interspersed with his wonderful stories about
his financial woes: The wife had been an amazing bargain originally – she only
cost a horse and a little laundry setup, and what a find: she was huge with a bottom THIS big! But now, misery: the last gold tooth, her
third, was the last she was getting. If
the dentist finds another one was needed she would be sent back to her
father. Ultimately, the scale came into
play as I would propose that however many oranges fit into the one bowl to
offset the big and the little stones in the other one would be mine for a
Groush. So we ended up with eight to ten
oranges for a Groush, and he had a 100% profit every time.]
Back in Marrakech, when we finished our courtship of the
carpet, I had gotten Keffiyeh down from 4,000 Dirham (a Moroccan Dirham is
worth about 12 cents American) to 350 Dirham and felt so very proud of
myself. (he was surely laughing up his
loose sleeve, but for us the theater alone was worth it). Now he took us to the “expediting room” where
a young boy with nut brown skin and liquid black doe eyes folded our purchase
into a small package and offered to mail it home for us. “How much?” we asked. “Fifty American dollars”. “Surely you are joking,” we said. “We will mail it ourselves. Where is the post office?” a long explanation, in French, with all
manner of names of plazas and turns ensued, a handle was put on our package,
and we set forth to find the post office in the heat of the day. En route we stopped at a silversmith’s and
bought a guaranteed unique scarf pin in silver and malachite for one of our
daughters. Bargained it down to half its quoted price. five minutes later we passed another little
shop which had the same pin in the window at the price I had bargained ours
down to. At length, we arrived at the
post office and there paid forty nine American dollars to mail home our carpet
which, to this day, adorns my husband's office.
No comments:
Post a Comment